The group at the dinner party was electrified. Flanagan adored Blitzstein’s work, Welles acclaimed it "a new art form," da Silva pronounced it "timeless." Everyone concurred that the FTP would, indeed had to, put it on. Houseman and Welles were the obvious people to do it. Although their partnership would end amid mutual recriminations after Welles moved to Hollywood to direct films, the two made a good theatrical team. "Since Jack is rather shy and Orson, to put it in Anglo-Saxon understatement, not very shy, it was difficult to tell who was responsible for what," Flanagan said. But the results spoke for themselves. Besides the acclaimed productions of Macbeth and Dr. Faustus, the Welles-Houseman team had also produced a knockabout farce, Horse Eats Hat, for the FTP.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

As director, Welles launched himself into The Cradle Will Rock with characteristic Wellesian style, promising Houseman a grandiose production that would be "extremely elaborate and expensive." It was. Welles’ vision would expand to include a 44-member chorus, a 28-piece orchestra, and a set design that used large glass carts to shift scenes. "He was inventive, witty, alternately lazy and energetic, and knowledgeable," remembered conductor Lehman Engel. At first he preferred long lunches to rehearsing. "Later he would start at ten in the morning and often not leave the theater. He might dismiss the cast at four the next morning, but when we would return at noon, we would find Orson sleeping in a theatre seat." At the same time, Welles had to juggle a busy lineup of radio work with his theater schedule.

In the weeks leading up to the preview, scheduled for June 16, 1937, Houseman sensed "strange, prophetic stirrings in the air." It was a decisive time for labor and for the WPA. As unions revived and expanded, strikes were frequent, and often violent. In 1934 autoworkers, truckers, and longshoremen had weathered police and vigilantes to gain valuable concessions. The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) had been formed in 1935, as had the United Auto Workers; together they coordinated a momentous and successful six-week sit-down strike against General Motors in early 1937. The political situation was tense. Right-wing senators, who had abhorred the FTP from the start, saw the new production as proof of infiltration by "Communistic elements." Soon Welles heard rumors that The Cradle Will Rock was considered "dangerous," even as the FTP itself was slowly being whittled away by funding cuts. A WPA official who came from Washington to preview the opera, however, pronounced it "magnificent," but the bough on which Cradle rested was by no means secure.

On June 12, four days before the first preview and with 14,000 tickets already sold, Flanagan received a communication from Washington. "Because of cuts and re-organization," it read, "any new production scheduled to open before July 1, 1937, must be postponed."

Welles and Houseman interpreted this to mean that Cradle would not open, ever. Welles would not accept it. "If the play cannot open as advertised under Government auspices," he thundered, "then Houseman and I will put it on ourselves!" On June 14 the production, its fate still uncertain, held a dress rehearsal at the Maxine Elliot Theater before an audience of supporters–the only people to see the Cradle as it was meant to be staged. "After they had left," wrote Houseman, "the lights were turned out and the doors of the theatre were locked. For us, they never reopened."

The evening of june 16 arrived–and the theater doors remained locked, with guards posted outside. The WPA had paid for the production, and the WPA had decreed that the show would not defy agency policy. Despite a visit by Welles to headquarters in Washington, the WPA had not lifted the ban. To make matters worse, the Actors Equity union prohibited its members from defying the WPA by performing in the show. The irony of the actors’ union preventing the cast from appearing in a production about unionism triumphant was inescapable.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to